The Ohio Department of Health's annual report on accidental drug deaths shows no end in sight for the scourge of heroin and opioid abuse.

The latest report, for 2015, released last week, is nothing but heartbreaking. Last year, drug overdoses claimed the lives of 3,050 Ohioans, a staggering 20.5 percent increase over 2014. It brings the death toll from unintentional drug overdoses since 2003 to nearly 13,000, The Columbus Dispatch reported.

Fentanyl, a potent narcotic often mixed with heroin, continues to drive the increase. As a pharmaceutical, fentanyl often is prescribed to late-stage cancer patients to ease suffering. But it's also being manufactured on the black market and is mixed with heroin to create lethal batches. In 2015, fentanyl was responsible for 1,155 deaths. That's 652 more than in 2014 and 1,071 more than in 2013. Stark County was responsible for 26 of those fentanyl-related unintentional overdose deaths in 2015.

Now, an even more powerful drug, carfentanil, which is used to sedate elephants and other large animals, poses a new threat in this epidemic. Law enforcement in Summit County believe heroin laced with carfentanil partly was responsible for 247 overdoses and 21 deaths that plagued the county in July.

Those on the front line are fighting tooth and nail to curb these deadly trends. But there remains too few treatment beds, too few counselors and simply too few dollars dedicated to fight heroin and opioid abuse.

The battle against opioid addiction in this country must be fought on several fronts. We cannot afford a half-hearted effort on any of them.

That battle involves law enforcement; counseling and rehab centers, especially residential ones; but it also includes doctors.

Sens. Amy Klobuchar (D., Minn), Joe Manchin (D. W.Va), and Angus King (I., Me.) have introduced the Prescription Drug Monitoring Act. It would require doctors to document each opioid prescription they write for a patient in a database and to check the database before re-prescribing opioids. It’s a smart and overdue bill.

…Ms. Klobuchar’s bill would address the beginning of the cycle by cutting down on the practice of “doctor shopping.” Ms. Klobuchar said one doctor reported that he had a patient who obtained 108 prescriptions from 85 different doctors. Sheriff Tharp told of an Ohio doctor who had a 70-year-old patient getting duplicate prescriptions in Michigan.

Requiring doctors to input their prescriptions (whereas now it is voluntary in most states), and checking to see if a patient has an existing prescription before writing another one, is only reasonable and prudent. It’s basic medicine: First, do no harm.